PVR's and capture cards

[Hiller]

I have read at bit on AVS about what I want to get for a capture card for my HTPC but thought I would see what you all use and what you like about it as compared to other capture cards. I want the ability to record and absolutely need the ability to use DScaler with it as this signal will be fed into my projector and will need to be resized and at least line doubled. How do your cards worth with XLobby and have you played around at all with somehow incorperating some of the functionality into you skin?

Thanks,
Steve

[smurgle]

I use a Hauppauge PVR250 because the picture quality is excellent, it records to native MPEG2 and it has hardware encoding. Plus you can plug in as many as you want and record x number of shows simultaneously. I needed the hardware encode so I could watch a DVD, record an HDTV stream and record DVD quality off cable all simultaneously .

BUT I am pretty sure it doesn't work with DScaler. If that is a must, you have to get a BT878 chipset card (I think) which is what 90% of the add-in cards use. For the most part I don't think it really matters which card as long as it has the right chip. This is from memory so I'd verify before taking my word as law.

I integrate into XLobby the cheesy way, I just have it launch SageTV. Works great though.

Hope this helps